Entering a US luxury category against funded incumbents
Paid media was returning 12 cents per dollar in a category owned by funded brands
The category belongs to national names with large budgets, in a purchase where trust decides everything. Return on ad spend was 0.12. Spend was rising, sales were not, and the instinctive response would have been to change creative or try new audiences.
The problem wasn’t the media alone. Three things were broken at once, and fixing only the campaigns would have meant buying more traffic into a site that couldn’t convert it and a tracking setup that couldn’t learn from it.
Gaps meant the platforms were optimizing without seeing real purchases.
The site lacked the signals a high-ticket buyer looks for before spending thousands online.
Product pages and checkout lost buyers who had already decided.
ROAS is 0.12 and spend is rising. Where do you start?
Make your call to see mine.
I fixed tracking, trust and UX first, then scaled under ROAS and CAC guardrails set before launch, with separate campaign structures per objective.
- ROAS and CAC limits agreed up front
- Separate campaign structures per objective
- Audiences grouped by size, so each tier learned one behavior
Fix the system, then scale the media
Three breaks at once
Tracking gaps left the platforms optimizing blind, the site lacked trust signals for a high-ticket buyer, and product pages and checkout lost decided buyers.
Tracking and site, first
Conversion tracking rebuilt end to end, plus trust signals and UX fixes on product pages and checkout, implemented with the developer.
Three tiers, each learning one behavior
Cold (50% of budget): 8–15M per audience. Warm (30%): 500K–2M, site visitors and cart abandoners. Hot (20%): 50K–200K, recent add-to-carts and checkout starters.
Read revenue, not first clicks
Attribution windows of 7 and 28 days tracked downstream revenue. By November, ROAS had moved from 0.12 to 1.62.
Revenue grew 44x as the system came together
- ROAS rose from 0.12 to 1.62 while monthly spend scaled 3.3x, and conversion rate went from 3% to 8%.
- November revenue grew 123% over October, and December was the strongest month of the engagement.
- From August to December, the digital channels I ran delivered about half of the brand’s total revenue.
- The conversion-rate gain had no single cause: the tracking repair, the trust and UX fixes, and cleaner audience signals worked together.
- The six-month contract ended in January 2025 when I left for the Ivey MBA. I still advise the founder informally.
I’d have studied the other half of the revenue
Digital drove about half of sales, and I focused almost entirely on that half. Understanding how the rest of the buyers found the brand, whether through referrals, repeat customers or word of mouth, would have given me better seed audiences for lookalikes and a clearer picture of what paid media was really adding.
Market entry is a system design problem. Paid media is one part of the system, and it can’t scale until the rest works.
More work